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Monero (XMR)
Basics * Short explanation: Private, fungible money, untraceable digital cash. * Longer explanation: Monero is a crowdfunded, open source and community driven privacy coin. Unlike Bitcoin, whos users aren’t fully anonymous, Monero is 100% private, secure and untraceable. It uses different algorithms to any other crypto that mix transactions and randomly generate fake addresses. This means that it’s impossible to see the sender and receiver of a transaction, as well as the amount being transferred. Tech * Coincap: 18.300.000 XMR, after that money supply will stop decreasing and stay at a constant rate of 0.3 Monero per minute. Highly deflationary economic model. * No Premine or Presale * Was created out of bitmonero, one of the first CryptoNote coins, which was created out of bytecoin, which turned out to be a premine scam, and the community took over and created bitmonero. * New compressed LSAG signatures will offer ~25% reduction in rate of blockchain growth, and around 15-25% speedup in verification times, first draft here. * "PoS isn’t possible for Monero because it reveals account balances which reveals user data. This is directly contrary to the social contract of which privacy is the key goal." * Will switch (10-2019) to RandomX PoW; "RandomX is a new Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm that Monero is scheduled (30 November) to begin using in the next network update. RandomX is designed to be ASIC resistant by using random code execution and memory-hard techniques to prevent specialized mining hardware from dominating the network. Because RandomX is optimized for general-purpose CPUs, the network will become more decentralized and egalitarian in the distribution of block rewards." Issues * The technology and team behind Monero are very sound. The project has been around for a long time and the team are all volunteers. However, due to the high level of privacy in Monero, it attracts a lot of hackers, criminals and others trying to evade the law, and is therefore being more frequently associated with these sorts of activities, which hurt its future prospects due to law enforcement restrictions on exchanges. * Monero’s main focus is on privacy and true decentralisation. The development team have prioritised the improvement of their privacy technology over marketing and user friendliness which allows it to focus on its niche. It can bundle transactions together in such a way that provides anonymity to the users. While the obvious implications are that Monero will be used for less than legal transactions many people do and will value privacy, especially in light of current developments around net neutrality etc. Monero has created a protocol where ordinary consumer computers can still remain competitive whilst mining, as opposed to Bitcoin which required specialised ASIC computers ''(Update: ASIC's have been developed for Monero, and MXR is now trying to counter it with regular forks). It should also be noted that Monero transactions are 25 times larger than Bitcoin’s which may prove difficult to scale going forward (LSAG Signatures have reduced the tx size). There will be no immediate issues with this as the block size scales dynamically but the main issue becomes bandwidth.'' * Had flaws in their anonymity that have since been fixed — researchers were able to deanonymize 62% of all Monero transactions. * Announced fixing a severe vulnerability. If detected by hackers, the bug could have allowed to cause significant damage to crypto exchanges and online merchants, accepting payments in XMR. Reportedly, the bug was discovered after a community member described a hypothetical attack on the subreddit of monero. It was found lying in the wallet software would have potentially allowed a user to “burn” XMR by sending multiple payments to the same stealth address. For those unfamiliar with the term, stealth address is a payment proxy, adding an extra layer of privacy. The user, sending the crypto, can transfer it to a stealth address, which then re-routes the funds to the intended real address. * "The official site of Monero was hacked (20-11-2019) to deliver currency-stealing malware to users who were downloading wallet software, officials with GetMonero.org said on Tuesday." Secret ASIC Mining * A Sia dev discussed the ASIC situation in a blog post (4-2018) "A few months ago, it was publicly exposed that ASICs had been developed in secret to mine Monero. My sources say that they had been mining on these secret ASICs since early 2017, and got almost a full year of secret mining in before discovery. The ROI on those secret ASICs was massive, and gave the group more than enough money to try again with other ASIC resistant coins. It’s estimated that Monero’s secret ASICs made up more than 50% of the hashrate for almost a full year before discovery, and during that time, nobody noticed. During that time, a huge fraction of the Monero issuance was centralizing into the hands of a small group, and a 51% attack could have been executed at any time. Monero’s hardfork appears to have been successful in shaking the ASICs. I don’t believe that the ASIC designers attempted to build flexibility into their ASICs, but now that Monero has announced a twice-annual PoW change, we may see another round of secret ASICs with more flexibility. The block reward for Monero is high enough that even if you think you have only a 30% chance of your ASIC surviving the PoW hardfork, it’s more than worthwhile to pursue a hardfork resistant ASIC." Team, etc. * Team can be found here. * Cabañas, Francisco aka ArticMine, Monero Core team member “holds a PhD in Physics and brings extensive business and non-profit experience to the table. He has actively researched and invested in cryptocurrencies, since 2011, and focuses on the economic, social, regulatory and long-term viability aspects of cryptocurrencies.” * 'Diego' * 'Mitchell' * Spagni, Riccardo aka fluffypony; Monero Core team member. Most well known public figure. * Smooth, Monero Core team member “A software developer, entrepreneur, and investor, smooth has been involved in several cryptocurrency projects since 2011, including development of the first multicurrency exchange (initially supporting Bitcoin and Namecoin).” * Othe, Monero Core team member “Currently he works as an independent consultant for various cryptocurrency-related businesses. He is known for his previous work as a core Vertcoin developer.” * Luigi1111, Monero Core team member and a sysadmin * Tacotime, Monero Core team member “A bioinformatics enthusiast and software developer from Toronto, tacotime has been involved in cryptocurrency since 2011. He is well known for his work on MC2, a hybrid PoS/PoW cryptocurrency, and his contributions to various Conformal projects such as btcd.” * NoodleDoodle, Monero Core team member “A former Silicon Valley engineer, NoodleDoodle is a seasoned hardware and software developer. He started his involvement with cryptocurrencies in 2012 and currently spends his time working on "cool aerospace stuff" for a university.” * Maxwell, Greg; CTO right after he resigned at Blockstream got invited by Fluffy Pony. Category:Coins/Tokens